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Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The ITA announced its preseason rankings yesterday, with Hayley Carter of North Carolina and Mikael Torpegaard of Ohio State starting the fall tournament season at the No. 1 positions. I had hoped that another set of national rankings would be run after the All-American tournaments and Regionals, but the ITA's ranking page says the next edition of the rankings will be on January 5th, when the first team rankings also come out. These early rankings also include a one-time set of Newcomer rankings, with North Carolina's Sara Daavettila and Virginia's Carl Soderlund No. 1 on those lists.

In more news on sporting events in North Carolina, the ACC has decided to move its neutral site championships out of the state, which includes the conference championships for men's and women's tennis, also held in Cary, North Carolina. The release announcing this decision does not provide any information on where these ten championships may go.

There's so much tennis reporting that I miss when I'm covering the US Open juniors and the American Collegiate Invitational, and here's several I've run across as I've tried to catch up on what others are writing.

Karen Pestaina at Tennis Panorama spoke with USTA General Manager of Player Development Martin Blackman about his background in tennis, the USTA's increased emphasis on the college pathway, the newly structured support for young professionals, the recent partnership with Adidas and other topics in this question and answer session.

The New York Times talked with players about no-ad scoring for this article. It's mostly professional doubles players who are quoted, but also Ronit Yurovsky, who played most of her last two seasons at Michigan using no-ad scoring for singles and doubles.

And ESPNW looked at the impressive number of US junior girls on the horizon in this article, which features quotes from Kayla Day, Carson Branstine, Ashley Lahey and USTA head of women's tennis Ola Malmqvist.